The clay pitcher shattered against the ground, and Zeth's stomach dropped along with it.
For a second, nothing happened. The man's head hung limp against his chest, greasy hair plastered to a face that hadn't seen sunlight in what looked like weeks. Then his eyes snapped open, and a scream tore out of him, making the earlier system notification about "no matter what happens, do not open the cabin door" feel a lot less like a joke and a lot more like a warning label Zeth should have read twice.
"GET IT OFF ME! GET IT OFF!"
"Hey, hey, you're free, you're okay..." Milo dropped his sword and grabbed the man's shoulders, his voice pitched somewhere between a golden retriever and a hostage negotiator. "You're safe now, I promise...I promise..."
Zeth stood a healthy five feet back, arms crossed, watching the man thrash against the last of the vines like a fish that had personally offended the ocean.
'This is exactly why I said no.'
He didn't say it out loud. Somehow, "I told you so" felt like the wrong opening line for a guy who had just been unstrapped from a murder pole.
Eventually, the screaming died down into something closer to sobbing, and the man slumped forward, caught by Milo before he hit the mud. Up close, he wasn't old...maybe in his mid-thirties, the kind of tired that had nothing to do with age. A brass name badge, somehow still pinned to his shredded shirt, read *Village Secretary* under a logo Zeth didn't recognize.
"Water," the man rasped. "Please...water..."
Zeth, against every instinct he had, summoned a bottle from his inventory and held it out. Small mercies. He would sort out how he felt about them later.
The man drank like he'd forgotten how, half of it running down his chin, and for a while nobody said anything except the wind and the tree that still hadn't grown a single leaf.
"What happened to you?" Milo finally asked, gentle in a way that made Zeth's teeth itch. "Do you remember?"
The secretary's eyes drifted, unfocused, somewhere past both of them.
"Festival," he said. "It was...the harvest festival. The whole village came out. Kids running around the fields, my wife was..." He stopped. Swallowed. "We were setting up the offering table. Somebody said to look at the sky, and then..."
His hand slowly rose to his temple.
"...then there was a dome. Black. It came down over everything like a lid on a pot. And I felt so...so tired all of a sudden, like someone had poured lead into my legs, and I just..."
"You fell asleep," Zeth offered, mostly to hurry things along.
"I fell asleep." The man nodded too fast. "And when I woke up, I was..." His fingers pressed harder against his skull. "I was tied. Couldn't move. Couldn't see. There was something on my face, and my head..."
"Your head?" Milo prompted.
"It hurts." The man's voice cracked, thin and childlike in a way that didn't match his face. "It's been hurting since I woke up. Like something's...like something's still in there...walking around..."
Zeth's smile, the one he wore like armor, faltered for exactly one second.
'That's not a metaphor. He means that literally.'
"Milo." He said the name quietly, not quite as a warning yet, more like the beginning of one. "Maybe we should..."
"How long was I in there?" the man cut in, louder now, his good eye twitching. "How long...? HOW LONG?!"
"We don't know," Milo said quickly, raising both hands. "But it's okay. We're going to get you out. We're going to get everyone out. The others are still..."
"The others."
The man's head snapped toward the row of poles behind him, the silhouettes still swaying faintly in the fog, each one wearing the same painted grin. His breathing had gone shallow and fast.
"The others are still counted. They're still counted...you can't..."
"Counted?" Zeth's grip tightened around his sabre without him realizing it. "Counted for what?"
The man didn't answer. His whole body had gone rigid, his spine locked straight, his hand frozen halfway to his temple like a photograph of pain rather than pain itself.
Then, slowly...horribly...he went quiet.
Not calm quiet.
Machine quiet.
The kind of silence that didn't belong to a person who had just been sobbing three seconds ago.
"...Sir?" Milo leaned closer.
That was the mistake.
Zeth already had one foot sliding back through the mud, every nerve in his body screaming the same word the notification had screamed on the cabin door.
Don't.
The man's head lifted.
His eyes, when they opened, weren't the eyes that had begged for water a minute ago.
They were red.
Not bloodshot. Not tired.
Red, the way the sky over the fields had gone red...wrong in a way that had nothing to do with color and everything to do with what was looking out through them.
"You were supposed to protect the crops."
The voice wasn't quite his either.
It came out wet and layered, like three throats speaking at once and losing the beat.
"Why..." it said. "Why did you free me?"
"Wait..."
Milo didn't even get the second word out.
The man moved like the rules of joints didn't apply to him anymore, closing the distance in a blur that sent Milo flying into the fence, wood cracking under the impact.
Zeth barely had time to plant his feet before a hand...cold, impossibly strong...closed around his forearm.
He grabbed back on instinct, some idiot part of his brain still running the old script where he was the guy with the advantage.
The bone in his arm snapped like a dry branch.
Zeth didn't even have enough breath left to scream properly. The sound came out strangled and small, and through the white haze of pain he saw the man's other hand rising, fingers curled into something that wasn't a hand anymore, but a weapon shaped like one.
Then...gold.
A blade of light punched clean through the man's chest from behind, and the red drained out of his eyes the same instant the life did. Both at once. Both final.
He crumpled forward, and Milo stood behind him, his sword still buried in a body that had stopped being a threat and gone back to being just a person.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
The fog kept drifting.
The tree kept not having leaves.
Milo's hand shook around the hilt.
Then his knees gave out, and he sank into the mud beside the man he had just killed, his sword clattering somewhere Zeth couldn't see. His breath came in short, broken pulls that weren't quite crying and weren't quite anything else either.
Zeth stood there, his arm hanging at an unnatural angle, staring at the corpse and the boy both.
For once in his life...he didn't have a single thing to say.